“…22−24 We then made reverse thinking on the ACQ-type luminophores: although the aggregation has led to self-quenching, the resulting charge transfer (CT) can show great potential to tune the ligand field strength, as the CT can tune the π-acceptor and π-donor of the ligand, and the latter is correlated closely with the ligand field strength, according to the ligand field theory. 25,26 Motivated by this, our attention moves to the D−A−D (D = donor; A = acceptor)-type second near-infrared window (NIR-II) fluorophores, which was featured with water-induced J-aggregation and significant ICT, as well as NIR-triggered ligand-to-ligand charge transfer (LLCT) owing to the narrow band gaps. 27−29 Here, in this work, by employing D−A−D-type NIR-II fluorophore L-C 2 H 5 , we prepared a ferrous complex Fe-(NCS) 2 (L-C 2 H 5 ) 2 (Scheme 1a), which has displayed the significant aggregation state-dependent SSS under ambient conditions (Scheme 1b).…”